SIGGRAPH 2008 Audio Portrait

SIGGRAPH, the penultimate computer graphics gathering,
is only a couple months old and I'm still thinking about it and
listening to various interviews and recordings I made there. Some
of the recordings were spur of the moment interviews, and some were
selections from panels I had attended. I even spent a good deal of
time simply recording interesting sounds that I heard while I was
there. Since I do so much sound editing in animation and machinima,
I tend to listen a lot at events and SIGGRAPH was filled with
incredible sounds.

What follows is a collection of some of the best audio from
SIGGRAPH 2008. I've decided to simply present the raw audio with
minimal editing or cutting (except for distortion or glitches).
I've grouped them into three sections; the first is a collection of
“spot” interviews I did with mostly random people I met at
different places. Sometimes it would be in a hallway or right
before a panel. I really wanted to chat with folks to find out who
actually comes to SIGGRAPH and what they are there for. I was
fortunate to meet a lot of interesting people this way.

-Flavio Mandriola, is a student with Animation
Mentor. We met on the subway ride back from Day One of
SIGGRAPH. His enthusiasm and excitement, even after a full day of
SIGGRAPH, was infectious.

-Matthew Bain is an inventor and programmer who created a
program called “Arctic Fracture”, which creates real-time
visualizations for live music. He was one of many fascinating
people who stood by large bulletin boards with posters of their
work tacked on.

-Animation students, Brian and Raquel, were part of a larger
group visiting from the School of Communication Arts @ Digital Circus
in Raleigh, North Carolina. I wished we had more time to talk
because I liked them both immediately.

The second group of audio clips is from two of the panels I
attended: The “Future of Character Animation” and the
“Games: Evolving on an Order of Magnitude”
panels. Both were very impressive and left me with a lot to think
about. The ability to communicate ideas and simplify them for a
huge audience really made me want to look at the backgrounds of
many of the panel members. Especially glad that the “Character
Animation” panel had a female (Michelle Papandrew) who worked
with Flash animation at the Cartoon Network.

The third group of clips are from the exhibition floor and were
originally intended to be part of larger articles for each of the
products I was interested in. But I thought I'd share them with you
here since I'll most likely do more direct interviews closer to
when some of the articles are published here at Renderosity. I
spoke with a variety of people who were either reps at booths or
were the actual creators of the product they were showing. The
interviews were on-the-spot and rough in places, but a lot of fun,
I think.

-Zane Conran, at the NewTek booth gives us the rundown on a very
successful product for them: Tricaster
Broadcast. And from what he has to say, I can see why.
Tricaster is an actual portable TV studio. Amazing.

-Motion Capture was a big deal at SIGGRAPH. I think someone at
the Renderosity.com booth suggested I chat with Tracy McSheery,
Vice-President and Chief Engineer at the motion capture company
PhaseSpace. Their booth was very interesting because
they were capturing motion during the entire 3- day Exhibition
schedule. You could watch the artists create, capture and catalog
hundreds of motions which, if I recall correctly, were going to be
given away for free. Mr. McSheery certainly knew is product and his
knowledge of the business is impressive.

-Shapeways is a company specializing in 3D designs
created by the user and sent to them for printing. I spoke with
Peter Paul Cornelissen, who patiently explained the ideas and tech
behind this future technology. I was impressed with the process of
3D printing that he described and felt like I was looking at Star
Trek technology in the making.

And finally, with the help of my good friend, Phil Rice
(Overman),
who edited the sounds and composed original music, I put together a
long sound portrait of the entire SIGGRAPH experience. From waiting
for the subway, to sitting in on panels, to collapsing in the media
room, the portrait is filled with what sounds were interesting to
me. I'm really very proud of the piece. I hope you find it
interesting. By the way, it's best listened to with headphones.
Turn off the lights, close your eyes and listen.

Ricky
Grove [gToon], Staff Columnist with the Renderosity Front
Page News. Ricky Grove is a bookstore clerk at the best bookstore
in Los Angeles, the Iliad Bookshop. He's also an actor and
machinima filmmaker. He lives with author, Lisa Morton, and three
very individual cats. Ricky is into Hong Kong films, FPS shooters,
experimental anything and reading, reading, reading. You can catch
his blog here.

October 20, 2008

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Article Comments

nickcharles ()
posted at 12:00AM Sat, 25 October 2008

Ricky- Thanks so much for a very interesting look at SIGGRAPH 2008! Enjoyed the interviews and the sound portrait! Very well done! Great work from Phil Rice on the music, too! Oh, and that conversation with Quasi the robot was priceless!

gToon ()
posted at 12:00AM Sat, 25 October 2008

Thanks, Nick. I quite enjoyed the whole experience. Since I work with sound so much, I couldn't help but record what was interesting to me. And, yes, the conversation with Quasi was so realistic that I actually came back and checked behind the drapes he was standing in front of. I though that maybe there was a human being behind them with a microphone. Nope, it was all Quasi. Amazing!